Chapter 2302

Chapter 2302

Randidly looked up at the three blazing fist attacks burning holes through the sky, each with enough power to still brutalize his images on the way to slamming into his gut. His heart fluttered as he scrambled for countermeasures. Even now, his internal organs struggled to rebalance themselves after withstanding the first attack.

He sucked on his teeth, eyes blazing. Are you making fun of me? Throwing three punches toward me, one for each of my images? Or is this number just a coincidence?

At the very least, by the time you recognize the outcome of these attacks, the second step of the process will be done. Randidly’s eyes flicked sideways, peering out through the storm of energy around him to where the Nexus proper continued to cover the memory with a film of energy, to create a Cohort. Only a small portion remained uncovered.

So, it came down to this attack. If he endured through this, the only wall left in front of him would be the actual accomplishment of transforming an imitation into reality.

“A warm-up is just what I need right now. Today’s been so dull.” Randidly straightened and rolled his shoulders. He could feel the ground still shaking beneath him from the prior impact, but he needed to move. Acri and Sulfur hummed their support for him. Acri suggested that they utilize the monstrous image physicalization and create the spear tail and that gave Randidly an idea.

All at once, his counterattack sprung fully formed into Randidly’s imagination.

He glanced around, his vision cutting through the choked air, still unsettled from the storm ravaging the ground and then the explosion of the first Timeless impact. Corpses could be seen strewn around in the area, remnants of the earlier fighting and testaments to why you shouldn’t get caught too closely in Randidly’s struggles. Broken limbs and twisted bodies, staining the ground with their blood. He breathed out a breath, aware of the impending attack, and closed his eyes.

The Dread Homunculus beckoned at the torn battlefield with long fingers.

The restless dead and damned rose, ten thousand specters masked in the storm and forever bound to furiously wander due to the violence of their end. Aether soldiers and Nether Warriors came, one and all, their figures flickering in the storm of black winds and crimson lightning around Randidly.

He looked at them with compassion. His image spread its arms wide, accepting the small hunks of negativity that anchored their remnants in place. Don’t you hate it? To be forced to leave off here. To cease moving forward. But help me and you can linger. Help me, and you will build futures for your people.

I need your power. To change this cage. Please.

He delivered the entreaty, knowing some would reject him. The flickering remnants of significance he spoke to now possessed little by way of intelligence. Mostly what remained was instinct. And about a third of those twisted forms began to fade. Their motivations pulled them elsewhere, away from the current Randidly offered.

But those that lingered... their eyes began to sear out of their place of rest light burning coals. Randidly’s Fateset grinned. Gotcha.Follow the latest novels at novelhall.com

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And then those phantasms that wandered through his storm raised their heads and bellowed out a call. The air began to hum with their resentment. An emotional gong sounded, its reverberations seeping into the ground and bouncing across the sky, moving impossibly quickly. They flickered back and forth, traveling out of the storm, speeding toward the previous battlefields around Homewell, to the vast mounds used as unmarked graves inside the Badlands.

The raced to the edges of the memory, couriering Randidly’s offer to all the bitter dead.

With a roar, Randidly shattered one of Elhume’s Fourth Fist. Even using the Moirae of Ripples Skillset, his attack held together.

Acri’s gleaming spearpoint cleaved through the knuckles and unleashed ways of destructive energy lashing out to the left and right, which Randidly quickly gathered to fuel the Songstress. A grin broke out across his face. Even though he had borrowed heavily from the memory for the fuel, the shape and the thrust were all his own. And with his own hands, he had defeated a true image attack from a Pinnacle being.

He did his best to hold onto that victory as the other two punches arrived. He drew back the massive spear for another attack, but the souls of the dead were unruly. Most of the borrowed force collapsed. Randidly barely managed to manifest a plane of gravity beneath his feet and set himself before they arrived.

He shifted to the left at the last second, accepting the weakening of his stance so the impacts were staggered. The first still broke through the remainder of his images and mashed him bodily against his own gravitational surface. He didn’t even have time to make a sound before the second fist caught him in the side.

It was all Randidly could do to keep the Songstress of Absence singing. For a brief moment, the superposition he maintained ground to a stop, all the valuable momentum he had built up over the last half minute vanishing. Yet only in that state could Randidly’s image endure, as he hacked out a cup of blood and shot sideways like a kite hit by a baseball bat.

His body tore a hole through Homewell’s Lifeseal as it shot sideways.

Only when he crashed and tumbled his way to a stop in the Badlands did Randidly nudge the Songstress of Absence back into motion. Randidly might not have been able to see straight and every bit of his body felt like it had been chewed up, but he sagged with relief when Pine’s weight still pressed through him, activating the mechanism.

He gestured broadly with his right arm, laying in a pile of shattered shale. “The second step is completed, Elhume. The bubble is closed. And the third portion is about to begin. Once the energy pulse examines the area and discovers how compatible it is with the Nexus, you will officially have your new Cohort-”

The sky tore. The blurry and unmistakable figure of Elhume stepped into the memory. The bright light from his figure made it impossible to make out details, but he clearly kept the tear open as he looked around; he had stepped into the time dilation of the memory, but it appeared the creator of the wistful memory still didn’t wish to break it entirely.

“What can you do?” Randidly asked.

The brilliant figure probably didn’t hear him, but he waved a hand and created deft hooks of Aether. Those shot outward and for a split second Randidly worried Elhume would target the Songstress, stretching between the two Aether mechanisms. But rather strangely, most of those hooks spread out to catch the bubble blown to create the Cohort.

The few remaining hooks snagged onto the pulsing wave of time that passed across them all.

Randidly didn’t understand until the next pulse of time came through. The nudging of time pulled and tugged on the bubble around the memory. That pressure caused the bubble to drift slightly... with the pressure light enough that the bubble didn’t tear.

But why- Then Randidly saw it.

The edges of the memory Nexus, as the net of Aether to capture an area drifted closer, didn’t stop it.

Because, in the end, it wasn’t real.